Fwd: Connection between Dravidian/Tamil and Australian aboriginal languages?

[Mani Manivannan]

Interesting.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Witzel <wit...@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 8:38 PM
Subject: Re: Connection between Dravidian/Tamil and Australian aboriginal languages?
To: Mani Manivannan <mmani...@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Witzel <wit...@fas.harvard.edu>

Dear All,

in our ASLIP conference of October 2006 (http://www.aslip.org/), Vaclav Blazek has given a paper that went much beyond mere phonetics and outlined a number of important Australian substrate words in Dravidian (some very basic terms and some numbers!)  An Australian specialist present (Paul Black) said it was the first cogent paper on the topic. See:

Vaclav Blažek,

Was there an Australian substratum in Dravidian?

Mother Tongue XI, 2006. 

The matter of immigration from Africa via  S. India to Indonesia and Australia (via Flores around 50,000 BCE) is complex: earliest skeletons from that period in Australia at Lake Mungo, some "Australian" genes have been detected in Tamil Nadu a few years ago, and apparently some "modern" (Homo Sap. sap.) Paleolithic tools in the same area go back some 74,000 years.  More on all of this if you ask…

Cheers,

Michael

PS: did you send  this to a list? If so, you can quote me ...

On Feb 29, 2012, at 3:39 PM, Mani Manivannan wrote:

Dear Scholars,

Are you familiar with the article by Dr. Andrew Butcher alluding to connections between Dravidian/Tamil to Australian aboriginal languages?  I don't see any follow up to this since 2006.  Does it mean that this line of research has been proven to be false?

http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/handle/2328/13707

Title:	Australian Aboriginal Languages: Consonant-Salient Phonologies and the 'Place-of-Articulation Imperative'
Authors:	Butcher, Andrew Richard
Issue Date:	2006
Publisher:	Psychology Press
Citation:	Butcher, A.R., 2006. Australian Aboriginal Languages: Consonant-Salient Phonologies and the 'Place-of-Articulation Imperative'. In Speech Production: Models, Phonetic Processes, and Techniques. New York, USA: Psychology Press, pp. 187-210.
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2328/13707
ISBN:	1841694371
Appears in Collections:	2004 - Linguistics 1702 - Cognitive Sciences

The abstract, available at several Tamil nationalist sites is as follows:

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES: CONSONANT-SALIENT PHONOLOGIES AND

THE ‘PLACE-OF-ARTICULATION IMPERATIVE’

Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology, School of Medicine

Flinders University, Adelaide

and

Research Centre for Linguistic Typology

La Trobe University, Melbourne

Ref Page 18 & 19

A hypothesis that the phonetics and phonology of a language have been shaped by the hearing status of the speakers is not easily falsifiable, but we can at least identify two major types of prima faciecounter-evidence that would be a problem for such a hypothesis: firstly, evidence that the cause of the hearing impairment had not existed in the population for long enough for it to have had the postulated effect and secondly, evidence that there are other languages with ‘long flat’ phonologies whose speakers do not show a high prevalence of COM and/or populations with a high prevalence of COM whose languages do not have ‘long flat phonologies. As to the first point, it is probably a reasonable assumption that the kinds of atypical phonological characteristics we are dealing with here would take longer than 200 years

18

. As to the second point, there are very few languages elsewhere in the world with a system of contrasts anything like those found in Australia. Whilst the consonant systems of New Guinea and Polynesian languages typically lack a voicing distinction (and in some cases a fricative series), the number of places of articulation is invariably restricted to /p t k/ (with the occasional /?/) and almost all of these languages have at least five vowels. Eskimo-Aleut languages, such as Inuktitut, typically have four places of articulation, no voicing contrast and only three vowels (although they do have fricatives). On the other side of the Arctic, Chukokto-Kamchatkan languages, such as Chukchee, arguably have five or six places of articulation, no voicing distinction and a minimal fricative contrast (but six or seven vowels).Perhaps most similar to Australian languages are the Dravidian languages of southern India. Tamil, for example, has five places of articulation in a single series of stops, paralleled by a series of nasals, and no fricatives (thus approaching the Australian proportion of sonorants to obstruents of 70% to 30%). Approaching the question from the opposite direction: according to the latest WHO data on the prevalence of chronic otitis media (Acuin 2004:14ff), Aboriginal Australians have the highest prevalence in the world – 10-54%, according to Coates & al (2002), up to 36% with perforations of the eardrum. They are followed – at some distance – by the Tamil of southern India (7.8%, down from previous estimates of 16-34%) to develop.

- Andrew Butcher

What do you think?

There are others that jump on this and speculate further, from Tamil nationalist perspective.

http://aiaioo.wordpress.com/tag/australian-aboriginal-languages/ 

http://dravidiantamils.blogspot.in/2009/04/tamil-in-australian-aboriginal.html

If there is a link between Australian aboriginal language and Tamil, considering the time they were split from the Indian coastal tribes, this may further isolate Dravidian from the middle eastern languages or indeed any other language in the region. Is it all just scholarly speculation?

Thanks.

Regards,

Mani M. Manivannan

============

Michael Witzel

wit...@fas.harvard.edu

<www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>

Wales Prof. of Sanskrit &

Director of Graduate Studies,

Dept. of South Asian Studies, Harvard University

1 Bow Street,

Cambridge MA 02138, USA

phone: 1- 617 - 495 3295, 496 8570, fax 617 - 496 8571;

my direct line:  617- 496 2990

[C.R. Selvakumar]

அன்புள்ள மணி,

 

மிகவும் ஆர்வமூட்டுகின்றது!!

 

மிக்க நன்றி

 

அன்புடன்

செல்வா

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